Dr. Gordon S. Wood, the Alva O. Way University Professor Emeritus at Brown University, will discuss “The Revolutionary Origins of the Civil War” in the Ohio Northern University Freed Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday, March 14, at 7 p.m.

Wood’s talk will attempt to explain how the American Revolution set in motion the forces that led to the sectional split and the resultant Civil War. The event is free and open to the public. ONU will bestow an honorary degree upon Wood at the lecture.

Wood is the author of many works, including “The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787” (1969), which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970, and “The Radicalism of the American Revolution” (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993. “The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin” (2004) was awarded the Julia Ward Howe Prize by the Boston Authors Club in 2005.

Wood received his B.A. from Tufts University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969. His book “Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different” was published in 2006, and “The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History” was published in 2008. His volume in the Oxford History of the United States, titled “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815” (2009), was given the Association of American Publishers Award for History and Biography in 2009, the American History Book Prize by the New York Historical Society for 2010, and the Society of the Cincinnati History Prize in 2010.

In 2011, Wood was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama and the Churchill Bell by Colonial Williamsburg. In 2011, he also received the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Award from the Society of American Historians. In 2012, he received an award from the John Carter Brown Library and the John F. Kennedy Medal from the Massachusetts Historical Society. Wood is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.